Rouviere Media

The Center for the American South issued a 47-page report this fall indicating that the South continues to suffer big economic gaps in comparison to other areas of the country.
The South’s economy is steadily improving, but it still is on the bottom in some areas, the 2011 Briefing Book on the South reported.
Ten of the thirteen states with the lowest median annual income are in the South, with Mississippi the lowest. The only southern state that is above the national average is Virginia.
Southern states are among the unhealthiest in the United States. Seven of the states with the ten worst rates of diabetes, obesity, hypertension and infant mortality are in the South.
The South leads the nation in unemployment.
Seven southern states are among the ten with the highest percentage of residents at or below the poverty line.
Rates of graduation from public high schools in the South are below the national graduation percentage of three in four students.
Southern states rank in the middle and low end of Greenopia’s ranking of green-friendly states.
Five southern states - Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas - are among the ten in the nation with the highest crime rates.
Eight southern states are among those with the lowest partiicpation in elections in 2008.

The Civil War and Technology

The University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library has a daily blog that includes entries from Civil War diaries or letters that were written on the same date 150 years ago as each of the entries. The blogs are creating a day-to-day picture of the Civil War through the words of participants in it.
The blog entries are taken from letter collections some of which cover the entire length of the war. They include letters written to and from people at the University, which was a hospital during the war.

Making Money on the Civil War

History buff Steve Cameron makes his living building Civil War cannons. His hobby began when he decided he had to have his own cannon. He had the barrel made, ordered the 57-inch wheels, then built the rest from scratch. When the economy slowed down, he went into cannon building full time under the name Trail Rock Ordnance.
He works from an 1841 ordnance manual. His clients are re-enactment units, collectors, history museums and states.

The Library of Congress has published an illustrated timeline of the Civil War. It includes materials rarely seen and never before published, including manuscripts written by Abraham Lincoln, drawings by Civil War combat artists, maps, color lithographs, political cartoons, posters, and period photographs. It was written by Marget E. Wagner and is called The Library of Congress Illustrated Timeline of the Civil War.

Famed Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut collected photographs of many of the characters she describe idn her diary. The photos have been put together with the diaries in a two-volume set of books.  The first volume includes photographs and woodcut maps  with her book, A Diary from Dixie, and the second volume is Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Photograph Album.